Former IMF boss walks away free

NEW YORK – Dominique Strauss-Kahn looked considerably better leaving a Manhattan courthouse Tuesday than he did three months ago when he first arrived in police custody, tired and disheveled, to face charges that he tried to rape a hotel housekeeper.

This time the French political leader was smiling, even looking like he lost a few pounds, in a dark blue suit and striped tie. His wife and legal team were also all smiling: Strauss-Kahn was a free man and, as he later told French reporters, “in a hurry to get home.”

A New York state judge had just granted prosecutors’ request to dismiss all the charges and denied his accuser’s bid to have a special prosecutor appointed, with an appeals court backing that ruling. The Manhattan district attorney’s office had asked for the dismissal after losing faith in the credibility of Nafissatou Diallo, the immigrant from West Africa who they said lied to them repeatedly both about her past and certain facts surrounding the case.

Strauss-Kahn still faces a civil lawsuit Diallo filed seeking unspecified damages. He also faces a rape allegation by a French writer stemming from an alleged 2003 attack. But the sensational criminal case that could have put the former head of the International Monetary Fund in an American prison for up to 15 years is over.

After the hearing, Benjamin Brafman, an attorney for Strauss-Kahn, called it an “extraordinary event” for prosecutors to stand up in court and admit that they no longer had a solid case.

“Unless you have been falsely accused of a very serious crime that you did not commit, it is impossible for you to understand or grasp the full measure of relief that Dominique Strauss-Kahn feels today,” he said. “This is a horrific nightmare that he and his family have lived through.”

Diallo lawyer Kenneth Thompson, meanwhile, repeated his accusations that prosecutors had a double standard because of Strauss-Kahn’s wealth and power.

“If Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a bus driver from the South Bronx, do you think prosecutors would have cared about inconsistencies in her stories?” he said, referring to Diallo. “We are disappointed … that (Manhattan District Attorney) Cyrus Vance would deny her day in court.”

During the 13-minute hearing, Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said, “We did not arrive at nor do we take decisions to recommend dismissal in this or in any cases lightly.” But after “collective deliberation, we determined we must take the course of action we are doing today.”

She said prosecutors were guided by a requirement to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Illuzzi-Orbon said that “whatever the truth” about the brief encounter between Strauss-Kahn and Diallo – it lasted less than 15 minutes – there was not enough evidence to show that it was a forcible act, and that a jury would have to rely on the credibility of the accuser to condemn the defendant.

Illuzzi-Orbon said the biggest problem with going forward was that Diallo “was untruthful with us during virtually every substantive interview, despite our repeated entreaties to her to be truthful, about matters great and small.”

Most damaging, Illuzzi-Orbon said, was that over the course of two interviews, the accuser gave a “vivid, highly detailed and convincing account of having been raped in her native country which she now admits was false.”